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This is a post dedicated to unsuccessful online searches. It is dedicated to all the time I have wasted searching a website for something that I know is there but can’t get to. Search engines such as Google and Bing trawl the internet gathering information and indexing it, in order to respond to search queries from users. This post isn’t about them, this is about the performance of search facilities on individual websites.

Every time I use a search box to bring up details of something that I know is on that particular website and it doesn’t appear I have a little rant. I could be dramatic and say that I die a little bit inside but in reality rather than slowly dying I just get frustrated and sometimes downright angry and the more time I waste, the angrier I get. There is no way to know how many websites I have abandoned over the years because their search facility didn’t display whatever I was looking for and I therefore, assumed that they didn’t have the item or information I wanted.

If you sell wellington boots online, when somebody types the word “wellingtons” into the search box on your website, it should return details of all the wellingtons on your website. Right? Not necessarily.

Does your website “know” that you sell wellingtons? What if you call them wellingtons but your potential customers call them “wellies” or “wellys” or “galoshes” or “rainboots”? Computers are incredibly clever, but they can only do so much. As a website owner, it’s your job to help them and some of that help comes in the form of metadata.

Wikipedia describes Metadata as “data that provides information about other data”

I’m a regular visitor to Scandinavian furniture store Ikea. I can happily spend a couple of hours in there looking at furniture, pondering how the various item names should be pronounced and queuing for hotdogs. I’m from Manchester in the North-West of England and in my childhood home we had a settee and two arm chairs. Five years ago if you visited the Ikea website and searched for settee it would produce zero matches and tell you that there were no search results found. The Ikea website was certain that there were no settees, but we all know better. I’ve actually been to their shop dozens of times and the place is full of them! They’re on the second floor and if you want to take one home there are loads more of them on the ground floor in boxes waiting for you to somehow squeeze into the back of your car, but because Ikea chose to call them sofas instead of settees, they didn’t show up in their searches. Somebody has clearly had a word with them because if you type settee into their website now, it brings up over 1800 products. Ikea still calls them sofas but their search facilities know that if any fellow Mancunians choose to look for settees instead of sofas, we’ll still find what we’re looking for.

After doing all the hard work of enticing potential customers to your website don’t lose them on a technicality. If you are given the opportunity to give your website additional information about your content, don’t waste it. This blog is powered by WordPress and the theme I’m using gives me the opportunity to add a document title, a meta description and keywords for this particular post. I can also add tags to this post which help people identify what the post is about or related to. These are your chances to give your website additional information. For those of you that sell online, if you have the chance to add additional information to your product pages, take it. Don’t waste that chance to give a little extra info. If we sell wellingtons include the keyword wellies. Give your search facility that additional information. It may take slightly longer to add your products but it will be worth it and once you get into the habit it won’t seem like an extra job.

The problem of playing hide and seek with online content isn’t unique to online stores, it can happen on any website and is particularly bad amongst large companies because they have such big websites. Local authorities often interrupt their hold music by suggesting that you could achieve your goals far more easily by visiting their website. I’m going to resist the urge to call some of them “big fat liars” suffice to say that their websites don’t always make it easy to find the information. The downside to this is that it means that people like me continue to clog up their call centres because I don’t have the patience to find what I’m looking for on their badly organised website.

Large companies are often also guilty of the same things with their internal websites. If you want your employees to use the intranet (internal website) to find the latest and most up to date product information instead of their collection of handwritten notes and stash of potentially out of date product literature, then you’d better make it good and you’d better show them how to use it. If you are the Royal Mail and an employee searches your internal website for the current price of PO Boxes and the search results bring back details of Commemorative Stamps then you’ve got a problem. That particular example took place almost a decade ago, so I’m sure they’ve improved, but what about your website? Can your customers and employees find what they need?

Another way that company websites work against themselves is in the words that they use to describe their products. Are you using the same words as your potential customers? If your business produces signage or vehicle customisation, what you call “decals” people outside the signage industry call “stickers”. Does your website know where to send them if they use the layman’s term?

The big search engines may no longer use keywords to help rank your website but your internal search engine might be using all that extra information to make sure that your customers can find what they need. It is not unheard of for customers to devote lots of time trawling the internet looking for a specific business but it’s very rare, especially for a small company. Don’t play hard to get with your customers, because no matter how special your business is, there is almost always a competitor waiting in the wings that they can go to instead.

The term responsive web design was originally coined by Web Designer, Ethan Marcotte in 2010 to describe the practice of creating websites that would look good to the user, regardless of what device they used to view the site.

Back in the olden days when phones were for making telephone calls, cameras were needed to take photographs and Facebook didn’t exist, for most people the only way to visit a website was to sit in front of a desktop computer, that was tethered to the wall by a telephone cable. Home computers typically featured a monitor and most users would also be using the same web browsing software. All this consistency meant that, although there would be differences, web designers could accurately predict how their work would be seen by their website visitors.

The idea of every design element being uniformly displayed is now a thing of the past. The rise of the smart phone and tablet computing means that since 2014 internet usage on mobile devices has been higher than that on desktop computers. Even when people access the internet at home or at their desk at work they are often using tablets and mobile phones to do so, which takes us back to the original question of why you should care about responsive websites.

Although there has been considerable debate about the methods and terminology in the years since Ethan Marcotte first introduced the term responsive web design, if you don’t build websites, the only thing you really need to know is that your potential customers could visit your website from a large screen, desktop computer with a top of the range broadband connection, the tiniest, cheapest mobile phone on a train with no wifi and an expensive intermittent 3G signal or any and every possible device in between and your website needs to look good on all of them.

It is entirely possible to create a beautiful well crafted website, designed for a large screen desktop computer and serve it to all your visitors including the ones using smart phones with tiny screens, but it’s a really bad idea. The reason it is a bad idea is because it won’t look the way you intended and more importantly it will be difficult for many of your website visitors to use.

Finding customers is the hardest part of any business, so please don’t waste all the hard work you put into attracting them to your site, by making it too much effort for them to engage with once you get them there.

So having told you what not to do, now it’s time to tell you what you should do.

Not Everything Has To Be The Same.

Firstly move away from the idea that your website should look identical on all devices. A website that looks professional and allows your users to achieve their online goals is far more important than a site that looks the same on an assortment of different screens, especially if doing so subjects people to frustration caused by accidental clicking, miniscule text and difficult scrolling. Having a website that looks amazing on a laptop but looks a mess on every single mobile phone is definitely not the way forward.

The website for WordCamp Manchester 2015 is an example of a responsive website. WordCamp is a tech event for people using WordPress for websites and blogs and the site built for the recent Manchester event uses one of its default themes. When the site is viewed on a desktop pc or laptop it uses a two column design featuring a full length sidebar. The sidebar displays the logos, the navigation menu and an assortment of other web content including their twitter feed, the sponsor logos and the sign up form for their newsletter. When viewed on a smaller device such as an iPad (held vertically) or a smartphone, the sidebar disappears and is replaced with a hamburger menu icon. (the 3 horizontal bar symbol, referred to as a hamburger because the top and bottom lines are said to represent the bun and the middle line the burger) None of the content is removed, it is still available to the user. If they press the menu icon it gives them access to the sidebar content.

As with all elements of web design there is debate about whether hamburger menus are the best option for websites being viewed on mobile devices, but if you have ever tried manoeuvring your way around a website designed for a desktop machine, you’ll probably agree that it is the lesser of two evils. I once tried to buy conference tickets on a mobile phone, whilst sat in a carpark and it was one of the most painful online experiences of my life. Fortunately for them I was really determined to get that early bird ticket and I can honestly say that there are very few other purchases that would have persuaded me to persist with the transaction.

Certain Things Have To Be The Same

Now that we’ve established that it’s acceptable to display your website differently, we move onto the second key point which is to make sure that your branding is consistent. This helps your customers identify who they are dealing with and also helps to cement your image in their mind. Even without the brown fizzy beverages, you always recognise Coca Cola. Logos, colour schemes and other identifiers such as custom fonts should always be used on your website so that your customers recognise you.

Start As You Mean To Go On

If you are considering a new website, make sure that your site will look good when viewed on mobile devices. Whilst it can be difficult to accommodate every single device and every choice of web browser, at the very least make sure that the design accommodates mobile devices because if you manage to attract people to your website it is almost certain that some of them will be using a hand held device.

I was so happy when I saw the design of my first ever website that I was totally oblivious to the fact that a third of my screen was taken up with my logo and very little else, it was also very difficult to view the site on a phone, so please don’t make the same mistake. There will always be at least one web browser or mobile device that doesn’t display quite as as nicely as the others and that can be a challenge but by including a variety of screen sizes as part of the build process you’ll be most of the way there.

Test your site on different devices

Remember the main purpose of your website and make sure that your customers will be able to perform whatever tasks and / or achieve whatever goals you need them to. Do not make it difficult for people to buy from your business.

If you already have a website and only ever view it on your laptop or desktop, visit it on a phone and tablet to see how it looks. If you are already in the process of getting a new website, talk to the developer and ask them how your site will look on mobile devices.

I earn my living building websites so it should come as no surprise that I recommend having a website built by a person who knows how to build websites. That person doesn’t necessarily have to be somebody with a degree in Web Development, Computer Science or Information and Communications because when it comes to skills, qualifications aren’t always everything.

You may remember that in my last post Do As I Say and Not As I Do, that I told you my personal views on performing skilled tasks, without the required level of skill, which is that you shouldn’t do it. Don’t cut your own hair, don’t design your own logos and don’t build your own websites unless you know what you are doing. None of these activities will result in life threatening consequences, unlike performing your own surgery, which I also advise against, but in most circumstances no good will come of it.

The choice between doing it yourself and paying somebody else to do it, usually comes down to money. Small businesses are often operating on a limited budget, so the prospect of spending thousands of pounds on a website is not only unappealing it’s simply impossible. At this point I’m going to say loudly and clearly that if you are a very small business, the chances are that you do not need a site that will cost you thousands of pounds.

For some businesses, a full agency approach involving a team of experts, unique software solutions and complicated system integration is 100% the right approach, but for the vast majority of small businesses it is simply not necessary.

I’m a huge fan of the word free. It’s hard to say no to things that don’t cost any money. The problem is that not everything you can have free of charge is without cost.

Firstly let’s consider time. How much is your time worth? You may not be invoicing yourself and banking payment, but you are still spending money. This is time that you could and indeed should be spending in your core business. Whatever you charge for your hourly rate, you are now spending on building your own website.

Secondly lets look at your reputation. If you have no design expertise and no experience of web development and build your own website, there is a strong possibility that the end result won’t be the polished and professional product that you’d like your business to be associated with. Website builders and template sites are not inherently bad, but without a clear vision, some basic design and enough choices it is hard to create something unique and professional.

Sometimes you have to spend more to get a certain level of quality but when you are operating on a limited budget, whatever you spend has to represent value for money and when it comes to online services, unfortunately a lot of small business owners are not getting their monies worth. A low monthly fee can seem cost effective but introductory deals and additional VAT can mean that over a 12 month period, your cheap website is actually quite expensive.

Having your own business is about finding customers who are willing to buy your products and services and once you’ve found them, building a relationship that encourages them to continue doing so. As a small business owner you are now on a list of prospects for somebody elses business. Endless phone calls asking to speak to the person responsible for dealing with telecoms, energy supplies, printer ink, advertising and increasingly the company website. Dealing with people trying to sell you things is almost a full time job in its own right. I’m not suggesting for one minute that there are sales people out there who would put their sales targets ahead of your budget but…

If you are paying every month, to spend hours of your time building your own website, using a site builder that you don’t fully understand, to create a basic looking website, which isn’t optimised for search engines, then perhaps your money could have been better spent.

If you chose your current supplier as a result of a cold call from a web design expert who didn’t actually offer you any design advice, then perhaps your money could have been better spent. If you had a free domain where the renewal fee is considerably more than paying full rate for both years, then perhaps your money could have been better spent. If you are dealing with a company who has a special relationship with Google but that doesn’t offer any advice on SEO, then perhaps your money could have been better spent. If you have to up your monthly fee to get any level of customer support, then perhaps your money could have been better spent.

If any of this sounds familiar, then perhaps you should be looking elsewhere.

Sometimes we learn best by making mistakes, but it is generally cheaper and less painful to learn from the mistakes of others. With that in mind, I decided that this next post should point out a few branding mistakes that you should try to avoid making with your business. Including a few that I am currently making!

Firstly what is a brand? A brand is the identity you create for your business. Your brand is how you communicate everything about you. It tells your story. It is more than just the logo. It is more than just your visual identity. It is telling the world what kind of company you are, the personality of your business and the things your company cares about. Your brand is who you are as a business and getting this right can make a difference.

My first business was a children’s clothes shop. I had a complete vision for my business and I knew instinctively what would and wouldn’t work. I had a consistent image and I was able to make my decisions on everything so easily because I knew my brands personality and it was obvious to anybody that dealt with me which company I was part of. Whether you like it or not your small business or charitable organisation is in none stop competition with everybody else that does what you do. Your amazing products, fantastic services and wonderful good deeds mean nothing, if the people you want to share them with don’t think you are professional enough to engage with.

According to Interbrand the top three global brands are currently Apple, Google and Coca Cola. All three of which have very well known and easily recognisable visual identities. You know instantly that you are dealing with those companies. At it’s cheapest and most basic, branding can be your logo and the font you use. Having a logo is a way of identifying you, so try and make sure that you have a half decent one. When you are starting out in business, you need to watch costs and logo design is one of the many things that it is easy to knock off the list. If you have graphic design skills and are able to produce something professional, then go for it, but sadly the majority of people don’t and shouldn’t try and create their own logos. In the same way that most people shouldn’t try and cut their own hair, do their own plumbing or perform any other skilled task without the necessary knowledge and experience. Owning some design software is not the same as being a designer.

This point brings us to one of the mistakes I’ve made recently with my business Village Web Company. Writing your company name in a cool looking font isn’t necessarily the same as designing a logo. Guilty as charged.

Get a logo that you are happy to have your business associated with and use it. Include it on your website, social media and written communications. It is an easy way for people to identify your business, don’t make it difficult for people to remember who you are.

Before I became self employed I used to work for Royal Mail, a huge publicly owned company who employed thousands of people. During my career I watched them change. We’d always had staff uniforms and matching liveried vehicles with the logo on them so we didn’t have to make any changes there, but in an organisation made up of different businesses, which employed thousands of people, in hundreds of buildings there was a variety of different communications being sent out. Some had the new logo, some had older versions, whoever wrote the letter could pick which ever font they liked and generally did. There was no consistency.

So what does a massive company have to do with a small business like yours? You don’t have to be a large corporation to have a corporate font. Whether you are communicating on behalf of Royal Mail or as a sole trader, the way you communicate says something about your business and that communication should at least tell people who you are and indicate that you are professional.

The Royal Mail was created in 1516 and has been a public service since 1635, so it’s a fairly safe bet that the majority of UK citizens know who they are and regard them as a professional outfit. Small businesses, especially those in the first few years of trading, don’t have five centuries of heritage to rely on, so we need to work a little bit harder and usually on a much smaller budget.

“Everything communicates” Sergio Zyman

At the very least make sure that all your communications match. When people see you online or receive a communication from you, make sure they know it’s you, especially if you have already communicated with them. If you decide that your current identity doesn’t reflect your company, you can always rebrand your business but it shouldn’t be a regular occurrence. That brings us to mistake number two. Guilty as charged.

Sometimes you know your business, it’s aims, goals and personality so well that you can easily make decisions on what fits your brand and sometimes you don’t. If your business provides a service it can be difficult to separate your business from yourself, especially if you are the only employee. Whilst you are deciding what you want your brand to be, you sometimes feel as though you are not moving forward. It can be easy to waste so much time planning your business, that you either never start it or start it and never do any of the work that generates an income. To avoid that situation it’s tempting to get a bit “he who dares” and launch your business shouting the phrase “carpe diem” without finalising certain aspects of your business. Yet another guilty plea.

At the time of writing I’m in the process of updating The Village Web Company which includes using the new logo and branding. Hindsight is an amazing thing, looking back you can always see what you should have done and more importantly what you shouldn’t have done. Having three visual identities in less than a year on the same website is definitely something I shouldn’t have done, yet here I am. Making stupid mistakes, so you don’t have to.

In this post we’re going to dip our toes into the world of search engines. Rather than launch into lots of details about bots, spiders, PPC, SERPs, SEO and a host of other acronyms, we’re going to take a step back and think about why it’s important to take the right path on the way to the top of Mount Google.

It may seem odd to be talking about getting customers to our site when we haven’t even talked about actually building it yet, but at this point I’m just going to ask you to trust me. If you spend time and money building a website without giving any consideration to how people are going to find it, you’re asking for trouble.

Having your business on the internet is all very well and good but what’s the point of being online, if nobody knows that you are there? This is where search engines come in.

The point of a search engine is to find relevant webpages. If you want to know about armadillos, crocheting, Lady Gaga or how to make a risotto, you tell the search engine what you want and it searches for relevant online content and presents it to you as a list of links to that content.

Before the internet if you wanted to know something, you had to either ask somebody or look it up in a book. Now if you want to know something you can just “Google it.” What makes a rainbow? What is Harry Styles’ middle name? Where can I buy a Disney Princess dressing up outfit? It doesn’t matter what you want to know, Google has it covered and the power of the internet has changed the way that people find information.

Given the choice between finding my copy of the Yellow Pages and looking up the contact details of my local carpet shop and googling it on my phone, the Google phone app wins every time. At this point the question is: “What happens if my local carpet shop doesn’t have a website?” In a lot of cases, not having a website means that you are excluded from the list of people your customers will consider buying from. Not necessarily because they care about your lack of digital real estate, but because you were simply not visible to them. You can’t sell goods and services to people who don’t know that you exist.

The fact that “to google” has become a verb in the English language shows you how much things have changed since the late 1990’s when they first started trading.

Now just in case there is any confusion, Google is not the only search engine, it wasn’t even the first search engine, but at the time of writing it has an overwhelming majority. In February 2014 Google had over 88% of the UK search engine market. (The E Word, 2014) It’s closest rival is Microsoft Bing, standing at less than 7%. The most recent figures show that Google’s global dominance is dropping slightly, but with such a mammoth head start, it makes sense to focus on them and ensure that the website you are building is easy to find and present to your future customers.

1. Make Sure Your Site Is Helping

Google use computers to discover websites and other online content. They then check all those pages and the links they contain to other pages and indexes the content it finds. There are a number of things you can do to make sure that you don’t hinder this process.

Do your pages include a title?

Do all your images have supporting alternative (alt) text?

Have you included title information for links?

Do you have any broken links?

Have you included suitable meta data as part of the site?

Is your content appropriate, suitable and relevant?

Adding additional information such as titles and alt text to your website is something that is done as part of the process of creating your individual webpages. (Now can you see why we’re having this talk now instead of later?) If for some reason the person building your website doesn’t include this information as part of the code, then adding it later would be an additional piece of work.

Not only is including this information a simple way to make sure that your website isn’t working against you with search engines, but more importantly, it also helps to ensure that your website remains accessible to users who may use screen readers or other technologies to access the internet. By ensuring that your site is accessible, not only are you maximising the number of people who can use your website, but you are also complying with the Disability Discrimination Act.

2. Do Not Try to Trick Google

Realistically the chances of you being able to trick Google into consistently getting you extra visitors is quite unlikely. The Google search engine uses a complicated top secret algorithm to make sure that whatever sneaky plan you come up with fails. Not only will you not get more visitors, but Google will also punish you.

3. Don’t Let Anybody Trick Google On Your Behalf

There are a lot of highly skilled, reputable online marketing agencies who specialise in search engine marketing. These companies can work with you to help you achieve the best possible search engine rankings. Unfortunately there are also a lot of other companies out there, who will not only put you at risk of being penalised by Google, but will also charge you for doing it.

If Google believe that you (or somebody else on your behalf) are deliberately trying to gain a higher position by breaching their guidelines, they will penalise you by ensuring that your website either doesn’t appear in their search results or appears on the last page. Being moved to the end of the results may not sound particularly bad, but as many search terms can generate millions of results, this is a very effective way of making sure that your customers find everybody except you!

4. Monitor Your Web Traffic

Once your website is live on the internet, don’t just sit back and think that’s an end to it. Ensure that your website includes an analytical facility to help you monitor performance. This is usually done with the inclusion of a harmless tracking code that collects information. Services such as Google Analytics provide you with a mass of in depth information on how people use your website. These include allowing you to count the number of people visiting your site, see which pages of content are most popular and identify the average amount of time people spend on each page.

Even this basic information will give you a much better picture of how your website is working for your business. When you can clearly see that your website traffic shoots up after local advertising or which product category pages are more popular, then that helps you make informed decisions about your business.

5. Don’t Be A One Hit Wonder

Getting to number one is a wonderful thing and means that the maximum number of people can see your website but if they arrive and then immediately leave, it was a waste of time.

Don’t bring the wrong people to your website just to get the numbers up. Your business will not benefit from having lots of people visiting your website by accident.

According to their website Google’s mission is “To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

If you deliberately bring people to your website who have no interest in your business and are never going to convert into customers then the information they find isn’t useful to you, them or Google.

A popular sales tactic for some online marketing agencies is to guarantee that you will be at the top of Google’s first page for a particular phrase. Before you sign on the dotted line, make sure that the phrase is one that your customers will actually use. Unless you are in an extremely niche business it is unlikely that people will naturally use a term that wouldn’t apply to your competitors.

It is hard to think like a customer and the more involved you become with your website, the harder it will be to look at your site objectively. Ask other people what terms they would use to look for your business and the products and services you offer, before you go ahead. Analytics software can also tell you which terms people used in order to find your site. Take advantage of this knowledge and consider including them as keywords and search phrases.

Hopefully these five pointers will help you stay on the straight and narrow. Despite the title of this blog post Google rankings are important, but essentially your goal should be to build a website that contains useful relevant information which helps to grow your business.

Good quality relevant content and a well structured, accessible website will go a long way to making sure that your potential customers find what they need, and by doing that you will also be complying with Google’s recommended guidelines.

Social media is a wonderful thing and it can be a great way to build your business, but ( there is always a but ) only if you do it the right way.

If you’ve read my previous blog posts, you will have noticed that I usually tell you not to race ahead and do things online, without properly thinking it through. Social media is definitely no different.

Getting your business onto social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter is quick, simple and cost free, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that it’s an easy option. Social media done badly, at best does nothing to help your business and at it’s worst can have a catastrophic effect and cause serious damage.

All businesses make mistakes from time to time, but most of them are in the relative privacy of your own organisation. Making a business mistake on a public platform, with global reach, can turn a mistake into something that ruins your reputation and gets your company the wrong sort of attention. With this in mind I decided to give you WorthyOnTheWeb’s 10 Rules of Social Media.

1. Choose Wisely

There are literally hundreds of different social networks, don’t try and be on all of them. Don’t even try to be on all the one’s you’ve heard of. Managing a social media account is a time commitment and shouldn’t be something you do sporadically. An out of date Facebook page and an abandoned Twitter account is not going to get you any extra business. It is also fairly pointless devoting several hours a week tending to your MySpace account if none of your customers use that platform. Think about where your target customers and / or business peers are online.

2. Be Professional

This is a social media account for your business, so be professional. As a small business it can be difficult to separate you from your company, but it’s important to consider whether it’s a good idea to entirely merge into one identity. If you decide that you should, then be aware that you are still representing your company with every post and tweet.

As a small business owner, it is almost impossible to avoid taking criticism personally, but be careful how you respond to negative comments posted online. The internet has many cases of small businesses responding inappropriately to criticism and regretting it. Customer service complaints can result in public slanging matches, which rarely resolve matters effectively and will attract the attention of an online audience. If a customer highlights poor service on social media, then publicly thank them for raising it and then try and get that conversation offline. Ask them to privately message you their contact details, so that you can communicate on a one to one basis and sort out the problem.

Under the umbrella of being professional, the usual rules of not posting anything when you have been drinking obviously applies. Tipsy social media posts are hazardous enough on personal accounts, but are a definite no when posting on behalf of your business. It is of course possible to delete a drunken tweet, but you can’t guarantee that it wasn’t seen before you did so. As a rule of thumb, just assume that anything you ever post on the internet, in any context, will exist indefinitely and be seen by everybody. If you are happy for the entire universe to read it and for you and your company to be associated with it forever more, then feel free to click send. If not “step away from the send button!”

Check your spelling and grammar when you post for your business. Writing informally is fine on social media, in fact it is usually preferable, but incorrect spelling makes you look unprofessional. Do you know the difference between “too” and “to”? Are you using “there”, “their” and “they’re” correctly? Lots of people don’t, try not to be one of them. Do not encourage your audience to question your competence and professionalism. Twitter’s 140 characters is generally not enough to say what you would like to say and follow all the rules of grammar and punctuation, but there is a balance.

3. Have A Personality

Social media is a chance to chat with your customers, so try and make sure that you have a personality and make sure that personality reflects your brand. The informal nature of social media means that you have an opportunity to engage, share relevant content and give your customers an insight into you and your organisation. Use your social media posts as an opportunity to build on your brand and show the world who you are.

4. Stop Boring People

Social media is supposed to be two way communication. It is about engaging with your audience. It’s not all about you!

I’m not trying to suggest that you are anything less than fascination personified but even interesting people aren’t interesting if they never stop talking, particularly if they only ever talk about themselves.

5. Respect People’s Time

There are a number of products that allow you to schedule your social media posts, which means that you can plan your time more effectively. When deciding on a social media schedule, think about the end result. It is useful to be able to send the same tweet more than once, but nobody enjoys receiving the same messages over and over again. Your blog post may be the best thing in the world (it probably isn’t by the way) but nobody wants an hourly tweet linking to it and if you continue to fill people’s timelines, there is a strong chance that they will get bored and stop following you.

6. Watch Out For Baddies

The internet is a wonderful thing, but it has a dark side. Ensure that you use a secure password for all online accounts. This advice also applies to your personal social media accounts, along with every other online system. Using weak passwords is a bad idea, as is using the same password for multiple accounts. Unscrupulous individuals will use your account for their own ends and you’ll be left with the havoc that causes. If you make the mistake of using the same password for more than one network, then you are giving them easy access to your other accounts.

Much as I personally hate some of the complicated rules you have to follow when selecting a password, there is a method in the madness and unfortunately at this moment in time, strong passwords are one of the best ways to protect your account from malicious strangers.

7. Be Careful Who You Share Access With

Sometimes the people who hurt us are those that we know. Many businesses have several individuals within the company who post on their behalf. Before you hand over the passwords to your digital identity, make sure that you have chosen the right person. Will you be happy with the content they post? When you delegate the job of managing your social media accounts to a third party, they are representing you and your company. How sure are you that they will represent you in the way you would like?

In 2013 a local pub demonstrated the dangers of not controlling access to social media. Allowing a disgruntled former employee to tweet on your behalf is a terrific example of how not to use social media for business. Following the dismissal of their head chef over an internal dispute about Christmas working hours, a Twitter account associated with The Plough made a number of posts about the sacking. The messages were re-tweeted thousands of times by other Twitter users and because the actual account had been set up (with permission) by the chef, the posts remained live for some time afterwards.

8. Stop Selling

Social media can and in many cases does, result in additional sales but it is about engaging with customers, not chasing them down the street and begging them to buy your latest product. There is nothing wrong with using social media for promotion, but be mindful that a pure 100% sales pitch is unlikely to help you build a relationship. Your audience is interested in your products and services, but if every post and tweet is you trying to sell them your latest range of widgets, then you’re doing it wrong. Talk with your audience not at them.

In addition to promotion and engagement, social media can be used for customer service and research, don’t waste those opportunities by only having one topic of conversation.

9. Use The Right Network For The Right Thing

Doug Wray created a famous and much copied explanation of social media explained through donuts.Get to know a network before you start posting on it and make sure that you don’t damage your reputation by making rookie mistakes.

10. Connect Your Online Life

If you have a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a website then make sure that your audience knows that. Include the details of your Facebook page or Twitter stream on your website. Do you regularly post images on Instagram or Flickr? If you do, then you should tell your Twitter followers. Do the people who like you on Facebook know that you have a blog? Do your blog readers know that you have a website? If not, why not?

If people like your business enough to visit your website then they may well decide to follow you on Twitter or Like your Facebook page. Give them that opportunity. Linking your website to your various social media content is also likely to improve your chances of being found on search engines such as Google

So those are WorthyOnTheWeb’s 10 Rules for Social Media. There are lots of other pitfalls but hopefully my starter for ten will keep you out of trouble whilst you discover the others.

In the last post, we discussed the importance of identifying the main goal of your website. Everybody accepts that they need to be online but if you don’t know why, then that could be an expensive learning experience. So assuming that you know what your website is going to do for you, it’s time to think about registering a domain for your business.

Your web domain is your “name” on the internet. For example worthyontheweb.co.uk, bbc.co.uk or worthybobs.com. It’s part of your address on the internet and an important part of your brand.

Web domains are registered with domain registrars and last for at least 12 months. Towards the end of this time you will have the opportunity to extend this.

Domain registrars are usually companies who specialise in selling domain names to businesses and members of the public. They often offer additional online services such as web hosting. Well know domain registrars include companies like 123-reg.com and UKreg.com.

The cost of web domains varies depending on which company you register them with and what kind of domain you have. worthybobs.co.uk is cheaper to register than worthybobs.com and although they are both the same name, they are separate domains and owning one doesn’t stop another company from registering the other. For example next.co.uk belongs to the well known British fashion chain Next but next.com belongs to Apple. There are lots of different domain types e.g. worthybobs.eu and worthybobs.net. The most well known types of domain for UK businesses are .co.uk and .com

If possible always own your own domain. To highlight the importance of this, I’m going to repeat that last sentence. If possible always own your own domain.

If your web domain is registered to the company who built your website, your friend who knows about computers or your soon to be ex-husband then you may have difficulties with your website in the future.

Web domains are registered for a specified period of time and if they are not renewed promptly, then your website will be unavailable and any associated email addresses will also be affected. Your website is an important part of your business and as such you should try and make sure that you are the person responsible for it. If the company who built your website goes out of business or a third party doesn’t check their email regularly, then the customers you worked so hard to get, won’t be able to get to you and you won’t be able to do anything about it.

Before you race off to your nearest domain registrar and bag yourself an awesome new web domain it’s time to stop and have another think. In order to get to your shiny new website, your potential customers need to know your web address and will have to correctly (emphasis on correctly) type into their web browser the Uniform Resource Locator or URL, as he’s known to his friends.

A web browser is the software you use to browse the internet such as Internet Explorer or Safari. There are lots of different web browsers but the most popular ones are, in no particular order, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera. When people type a correct URL into the box, the web browser shows them that webpage. If your customers type the URL incorrectly, then the web browser will not take them to the webpage you intended. They could end up with an error message, on an alternative website or given the chance to search for an alternative. None of which helps you. With this in mind think carefully about the domain you register and if possible try and make it obvious that it is you they are connecting with. I named my first business Worthybobs so I registered the domains of worthybobs.com and worthybobs.co.uk. Online retail giants Amazon did exactly the same thing. (Not because I told them to.)

Using your company name as your web domain is a good way to maintain consistency and makes it clear to your customers which business they are visiting. If your company name is long, complicated or difficult to spell then think about how your customers will remember it and consider using an alternative if you need to.

If the name of your business is made up of more than one word it’s important to make sure that this isn’t going to cause potential problems. Domain names do not have spaces, so you need to ensure that your company name is still clear without it. Choose a potential name and then try writing it down in lowercase. The purpose of this is to make sure that people looking at your domain name won’t be confused, shocked or giggling like an adolescent. Companies such as Therapist Finder and Pen Island are famous on the internet for all the wrong reasons. Pen Island are a manufacturer of custom pens, but their decision not to separate their company name with a hyphen has made their web domain a source of amusement for many people. It also means that any genuine visitors run the risk of landing on a site with adult content if they forget that Pen Island’s domain ends in .net.

Owning more than one web domain allows you to tailor your site to different visitors if you need to. Amazon have numerous web domains which allows them to produce similar content for different countries. As a large multi-national retailer Amazon also have numerous other domains including Amazon.fr, Amazon.es and Amazon.de which host their French, Spanish and German online stores, with all content written in the appropriate language for those customers and all retail transactions conducted in their local currency. Amazon.co.uk is aimed at British consumers and trades in pounds sterling, their US online store is Amazon.com and therefore trades in the US dollar. At this stage you may not be ready for world domination, but it is something to think about if you have a business which involves regular overseas dealings.

Buying a web domain is relatively easy. You visit the website of a web domain registrar and search for your required name. Large companies such as 123-reg.com will also show you the availability of other domains with the same name. These online searches show you immediately if your preferred domain name is unavailable. The results of your search will also give you the opportunity to reconsider your decision if another company has registered a domain with the same name. I own claireworthington.co.uk but claireworthington.com belongs to a textile designer who sells bedlinen online. If you need your domain name to stand out, then consider whether you should choose an alternative.

Having jumped through all these hoops, once you are happy with your choice you add it to your basket and pay for it online as you would with any other online purchase. You now have your own web domain and as long as you make sure that the domain registrars always have your contact details you and your new domain can live a long and happy life together.

There are a lot of things to think about before you start to build a website, or engage somebody else to build one for you. It is very easy to get into discussing features and how wonderful your new website is going to look without really getting involved in what your website needs to do in order to support your business.

Nobody knows your business better than you do and like any other business expense your site needs to work for you. A website can cost anything from absolutely zero to tens of thousands of pounds, but even a cheap website should have a purpose. It’s also wise to remember that sometimes you get what you pay for, so it’s important to choose wisely.

So before you reach the stage of handing over a copy of your logo and a bag of money, lets talk about your shiny new website and answer some very important questions. What is the primary goal? What’s it’s purpose? What do you want it to do? If your website could only do one thing, what should that be? One way to answer these questions is to think about the people visiting your website. Who are they and when they get to your website what do you want them to do?

Common website goals include selling products, showcasing your work and encouraging people to ring and make appointments.

It is vital that you have a clear idea of the goals for your website. If you are running an online store then the goal is to sell online, which means that you want your customers to select and purchase your products. If however you are a hairdresser or run a beauty salon then you will want customers to make an appointment by either ringing you or calling into the salon, so it’s important that your telephone number is prominently displayed. This is also vital for building services or other home improvements which require a home visit in order to provide quotes.

For many businesses a website can be used as a shop window as it presents an opportunity to show examples of your work. It’s a chance for you stand out from your competitors and show your skills to potential customers. Although their skill set may be very different from landscape gardeners to nail technicians pictures of before and after can be a persuasive way to help potential clients use their imagination and picture how you can help them.

Although websites are often viewed primarily as a tool to drive sales, they can also be used to provide customer service. Giving customers an opportunity to raise an issue online means that you are able to provide a 24 hour customer service facility and is usually cheaper to run than a large call centre. You will still need customer service personnel to resolve the issues and respond to your customers but if a large percentage of your enquiries are sent online then you have the advantage of being able to schedule the online enquiries to a time when the telephones are less busy. Simple techniques such as providing opening times, online maps and lists of FAQ’s (Frequently Asked Questions) can allow your customers to serve themselves and reduce the amount of time you spend on the telephone.

Once you have spent some time identifying the goals for your website and have a clear picture of what the website needs to do, it will be easier for you to choose which features your website should include. It may also influence your choice of layout and design. If you expect them to ring you then don’t hide your telephone number in a contact page. If you would like them to sign up to your newsletter, make it quick and easy. Simple things such as adding a form to collect enquiries is a better solution than hoping that your customer provides all the information you need in an email.

Hopefully this post will help you to identify the goals for your website or at least encourage you to think about it. If you aren’t sure what your website is supposed to do, then don’t spend any money until you are.

My mission is to help very small businesses with their online lives and unfortunately for lots of artisans and small independent retailers, harnessing the power of the internet can be a struggle.

It is widely accepted that being online is absolutely essential for any business in 2014, but unless you already have some tech knowledge, doing that can start to get confusing and expensive. Without an unlimited budget, it can be difficult to create a professional online presence that reflects your personal skills and business aspirations. It’s also easy to get into a situation where you make enquiries and people start talking about hosting packages, SEO integration, bandwidth, analytics and content management systems. If you find yourself questioning your need for a dedicated server, when you have no idea what a server is, then things have got out of hand. It’s not that it isn’t a valid question but if you nod politely and fake smile your way through these conversations, there is a danger that you will spend a lot of your money on things that don’t meet your needs. Nobody needs a stunning new online shop that they can’t add their products to, or dozens of social media accounts that they don’t have the time or inclination to maintain.

Here at WorthyOnTheWeb I’m here to talk in plain(ish) English about getting your business online. I’ll explain the key terms you need to know in order to decide what your business needs. This blog is aimed at those of you who need to know more about presenting yourselves online, without having to become a digital expert. It’s designed to teach you some of the basics that will hopefully stop you making expensive mistakes that can damage your business. I also hope that this will help you feel more confident when you have to approach web designers or other IT professionals. I’m here to help you understand the basics of what you need, if you decide that you’d like me to work with you, then that’s great too.